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Nennius, the 9th century chronicler who is famously the earliest (and therefore, in some ways, the most reliable) author to mention King Arthur, apologized for the somewhat unstructured and non-narrative nature of his information by saying (in Latin, of course), "I have made a heap of all that I found." And later historians have been enormously grateful for his heaping tendencies--even more grateful than they might have been if he'd done more interpretation, organization, and processing of the information. (Not that I believe that Nennius did no interpretation at all.)
I often think about Nennius when working on my own research projects because I tend to be more inspired to make great heaps of thematic data than to synthesize theories and interpretations of them. Not that I don't plan to do analysis and synthesis, but all too often my inspiration moves on before I get to that stage.
Back when I first started on amateur historical research, this was a bit of a problem. I'd start piling up my data, perhaps start organizing and coding and rearranging it. Then I'd hit some sort of speedbump. Maybe I'd conclude that I didn't have the right background to do the analysis properly. Maybe I'd decide I needed more data before I could say anything useful. Maybe I was still thinking about what my purpose and audience were. And in a traditional, pre-internet context, those factors were a big part of deciding how to invest in the format of the eventual presentation.
As I've gotten more comfortable with the net, I've found that there's a great deal of value in simply making public heaps of what I've found. I've taken that approach for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. Yes, I'm doing commentary and analysis along the way, but I didn't wait to have a complete and exhaustive bibliography first. I didn't feel the need for an over-arching theoretical structure (beyond "would this be useful to a novelist creating lesbian characters?"). I just started tossing stuff in the heap and figured any larger structure could come along later.
I did something a bit more structured with my Surviving Garments Database. This is a project that was originally conceived of as a hard-copy book. A published presentation of each garment with diagrams and descriptions and context. (I already knew at that time that including photographs would be prohibitively expensive, alas.) And as a fixed publication, it would be important to have as complete a list of garments as possible, so I set myself to the task of tracking things down, identifying publications, creating a database, and so forth. Eventually, I realized that I'd never come to a stopping point that way. (For one thing, there are a heck of a lot more surviving pre-modern garments than I'd ever imagined!) I concluded that the value to other people of having access to the database "as is" was far more than the value of having the fully realized project in finished form. So--with the aid of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scotica's web guru skills--I took the extremely incomplete database as it was and tossed up a searchable version on my website. And, other than a minor coding bug fix, I haven't touched it since then. It's been six years. I don't know whether it was the act of making it available that made me fall away from the project, or whether I was on the verge of moving on anyway and had the good fortune to have the impulse to web it before doing so. But there it is. (I would, in fact, be quite happy to hand off the raw data to anyone else who wanted to do more with it at this point.)
That step never happened with my Welsh Names Database. At one time, this project was my Grand Passion. It was one of the driving reasons why I decided to get a PhD in Linguistics. I was going to write the definitive, exhaustive reference work on pre-modern personal names from Welsh records. I have, I think, something close to 10,000 people's names in the database, covering the period from the earliest stone inscriptions up through tax and census records ca. 1600. I have an intricate system for coding source, date, and linguistic data about each name element, a system for determining standard reference forms, a coding system for analyzing overall personal name structures, and a 4-level "confidence code" for tracking how reliable each piece of interpretation is. It's not finished. It's far from finished. It will likely never be finished. Because I wanted it to be perfect and complete before I showed it to the world. In part, this was because at the time I was thinking of my primary audience as being amateur historians, such as people developing SCA personas. So I was trying to present the data in a way that would make it harder for it to be misinterpreted and misused by people with little to no background in the field. It would probably be better at this point to strip out much of the interpretation (or simply acknowledge it as incomplete) and put the half-baked data out with a powerful search engine for people to use as they please. Because otherwise my heap of data is going to sit there in a dark corner forever, decaying into random electrons.
I've done better with smaller data heaps. When I've had an impulse to pull together semi-raw data about some interesting topic with a much narrower scope, I generally have had an immediate presentation context that was amenable to throwing up on a web page. This is what I've done with my research project on the "shepherd's purse" motif in art, on depictions of picnic-like meals in medieval and renaissance art, with a web version of my great-great-grandfather's Civil War diaries and letters, and with any number of other things that had the good fortune to have been written up in a format that was easy to web. Many of them are incomplete (such as the diaries) but set up in a form where I can add material easily. It goes farther than the costumer's philosophy of "done is beautiful" -- it goes all the way to "existence is beautiful". (If you have never explored my personal website, take a few hours sometimes to poke around. It's kind of bare-bones in design, but chock-full of interesting articles.)
This is my life; this is my philosophy. Ego autem coacervavi omne quod inveni: I've made a heap of all that I can find. I hope that posterity will find something worth digging for within those heaps.
I often think about Nennius when working on my own research projects because I tend to be more inspired to make great heaps of thematic data than to synthesize theories and interpretations of them. Not that I don't plan to do analysis and synthesis, but all too often my inspiration moves on before I get to that stage.
Back when I first started on amateur historical research, this was a bit of a problem. I'd start piling up my data, perhaps start organizing and coding and rearranging it. Then I'd hit some sort of speedbump. Maybe I'd conclude that I didn't have the right background to do the analysis properly. Maybe I'd decide I needed more data before I could say anything useful. Maybe I was still thinking about what my purpose and audience were. And in a traditional, pre-internet context, those factors were a big part of deciding how to invest in the format of the eventual presentation.
As I've gotten more comfortable with the net, I've found that there's a great deal of value in simply making public heaps of what I've found. I've taken that approach for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. Yes, I'm doing commentary and analysis along the way, but I didn't wait to have a complete and exhaustive bibliography first. I didn't feel the need for an over-arching theoretical structure (beyond "would this be useful to a novelist creating lesbian characters?"). I just started tossing stuff in the heap and figured any larger structure could come along later.
I did something a bit more structured with my Surviving Garments Database. This is a project that was originally conceived of as a hard-copy book. A published presentation of each garment with diagrams and descriptions and context. (I already knew at that time that including photographs would be prohibitively expensive, alas.) And as a fixed publication, it would be important to have as complete a list of garments as possible, so I set myself to the task of tracking things down, identifying publications, creating a database, and so forth. Eventually, I realized that I'd never come to a stopping point that way. (For one thing, there are a heck of a lot more surviving pre-modern garments than I'd ever imagined!) I concluded that the value to other people of having access to the database "as is" was far more than the value of having the fully realized project in finished form. So--with the aid of
scotica's web guru skills--I took the extremely incomplete database as it was and tossed up a searchable version on my website. And, other than a minor coding bug fix, I haven't touched it since then. It's been six years. I don't know whether it was the act of making it available that made me fall away from the project, or whether I was on the verge of moving on anyway and had the good fortune to have the impulse to web it before doing so. But there it is. (I would, in fact, be quite happy to hand off the raw data to anyone else who wanted to do more with it at this point.)That step never happened with my Welsh Names Database. At one time, this project was my Grand Passion. It was one of the driving reasons why I decided to get a PhD in Linguistics. I was going to write the definitive, exhaustive reference work on pre-modern personal names from Welsh records. I have, I think, something close to 10,000 people's names in the database, covering the period from the earliest stone inscriptions up through tax and census records ca. 1600. I have an intricate system for coding source, date, and linguistic data about each name element, a system for determining standard reference forms, a coding system for analyzing overall personal name structures, and a 4-level "confidence code" for tracking how reliable each piece of interpretation is. It's not finished. It's far from finished. It will likely never be finished. Because I wanted it to be perfect and complete before I showed it to the world. In part, this was because at the time I was thinking of my primary audience as being amateur historians, such as people developing SCA personas. So I was trying to present the data in a way that would make it harder for it to be misinterpreted and misused by people with little to no background in the field. It would probably be better at this point to strip out much of the interpretation (or simply acknowledge it as incomplete) and put the half-baked data out with a powerful search engine for people to use as they please. Because otherwise my heap of data is going to sit there in a dark corner forever, decaying into random electrons.
I've done better with smaller data heaps. When I've had an impulse to pull together semi-raw data about some interesting topic with a much narrower scope, I generally have had an immediate presentation context that was amenable to throwing up on a web page. This is what I've done with my research project on the "shepherd's purse" motif in art, on depictions of picnic-like meals in medieval and renaissance art, with a web version of my great-great-grandfather's Civil War diaries and letters, and with any number of other things that had the good fortune to have been written up in a format that was easy to web. Many of them are incomplete (such as the diaries) but set up in a form where I can add material easily. It goes farther than the costumer's philosophy of "done is beautiful" -- it goes all the way to "existence is beautiful". (If you have never explored my personal website, take a few hours sometimes to poke around. It's kind of bare-bones in design, but chock-full of interesting articles.)
This is my life; this is my philosophy. Ego autem coacervavi omne quod inveni: I've made a heap of all that I can find. I hope that posterity will find something worth digging for within those heaps.
